STANDING PINE

In memory of Tomoaki Shitara (1955-2021), STANDING PINE will present his memorial exhibition entitled “Paulownia Leaves in Winter, A Child of Spring” from Saturday 15th April. This exhibition features his last work and previous works, which were on view at galleries in Aichi. It presents a deep look at his works in order to understand his working practices and artistic motivations.

Tomoaki Shitara was born in Hokkaido in 1955. After completing his master’s degree in Aichi University of the Arts, he lived and worked in Aichi and his works were shown in Japan and overseas. Shitara is known for its unique style of painting not only on canvases but also various supports, in addition to oil paintings, Tempera paintings, paintings with encaustic and silverpoint, and drawings on notebooks. His solo exhibitions were held at Hakutosya (Aichi), Shinobazu Gallery (Tokyo), STANDING PINE (Aichi) and others, and his works are included in many major public and private collections such as Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya City Art Museum, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art and son on.

STANDING PINE has held six solo exhibitions of Tomoaki Shitara since 2009 including “I Ate My Tail Everyday”, “A Large Moleskine Notebook”, “Broken picture story show”, “I folded a letter and put it an envelope”, “Red”, and “KUMORISORA NI ANA NO AITEIRU E (A Picture of Holes in the Cloudy Sky)”, and a lot of people were attracted by his works every time. The works with meaningful titles were created by an experimental and sometimes humorous way of production and they always gave us new insights and perceptions with its mysterious attraction. This exhibition features mainly the works that were on view at the galleries in Aichi together with his latest works that will be show for the first time to the public. The motifs and their ways of representation were changing over times sometimes into something even the artist himself did not expected. The meanings of artworks resonate together beyond the concepts of individual works and his diverse brushwork and unexpected motifs invite viewers to enter Shitara’s distinctive world.

Tomoaki Shitara is an artist who always seriously had faced “the act of painting”. When he talked about the recognition of dreams during his life, he told us J. Allen Hobson’s theory that “Dreaming is a state of non-conscious and brain chemicals in this situation are similar to the ones in psychological disorder”. It seems that Shitara’s works are based on the world can be called non-conscious. The horizontally flipped world like a mirror, bumpy images, front and back, and numerous motifs like clouds and holes invite viewers to a dream-like world and raise a question “What is the act of painting?” as if it represents a strong connection between life and death. Turning our thoughts and imagination to this vague question, the only thing we can do is thinking over various possibilities in front of the works left.

Date: 2023.4.15 Sat - 2023.5.13. Sat
Hours: 13:00 - 18:00
Closed on Monday, Tuesday and National holidays
*The gallery will be open on 3rd, 4th and 5th May.

A Boy Blue and A Girl Yellow / oil on balance scale / 17.5×28×10.5cm / 2017

A Blue Belly Bottun / oil on canvas / M4(33.3×19cm) / 2021

Powered by Froala Editor